Source Code Rejuvenation Is Not Refactoring

Executive Summary

Programmers rely on programming idioms, design patterns, and workaround techniques to make up for missing programming language support. Evolving languages often address frequently encountered problems by adding language and library support to subsequent releases. By using new features, programmers can express their intent more directly. As new concerns, such as parallelism or security, arise, early idioms and language facilities can become serious liabilities. Modern code sometimes benefits from optimization techniques not feasible for code that uses less expressive constructs.